A couple of vegetarian philosophers with no knowledge of biology are alarmed…no, horrified at what’s going on out there in the wilderness.
The animal welfare conversation has generally centered on human-caused animal suffering and human-caused animal deaths. But we’re not the only ones who hunt and kill. It is true (and terrible) that an estimated 20 billion chickens were born into captivity in 2013 alone, many of whom live in terrible conditions in factory farms. But there are estimated 60 billion land birds and over 100 billion land mammals living in the wild. Who is working to alleviate their suffering? As the philosopher Jeff McMahan writes: “Wherever there is animal life, predators are stalking, chasing, capturing, killing, and devouring their prey. Agonized suffering and violent death are ubiquitous and continuous.”
They have a solution to this problem, though. We should humanely execute all predators. It’s the most ethical solution!
By killing predators, we can save the lives of the many prey animals like wildebeests, zebras, and buffalos in the local area that would otherwise be killed in order to keep the animals at the top of the food chain alive. And there’s no reason for considering the lives of predators like lions to be more important than the lives of their prey.
To be fair, they consider other alternatives to killing predators.
…even if we care about preventing predators from killing other animals, it is surely better to do this humanely than to kill them. For example, we could take the predators out of their natural environment and give them good lives that don’t involve hunting prey.
Yes. The ethical thing to do would be to put all lions in cages and give them a healthy, nutritious diet made of soy protein.
They also recognize that other contributors to animal suffering are parasites and disease, so they think we should be treating wild animals for these problems as well. Apparently, the only suffering that counts is that of mammals and birds, so knocking off a lot of invertebrates has no ethical consequences, just as killing or otherwise neutralizing animals that eat other animals is acceptable, because they’re causing suffering. We need to turn the world into a giant children’s petting zoo, I guess.
It’s weird. It’s as if they are completely unaware of the fact that predation maintains and increases biodiversity, or that there’s more to wildlife than mammals and birds, or that life is a complex web of interactions — that bears killing salmon is a critical source of phosphorus for trees. Why do they hate forests?
This is a real problem, that dumbass ignorant philosophers can propose idiotic ideas in the guise of ethics — ideas that, if they were even attempted to be implemented, would cause immense destruction and suffering in the non-human world.
Now normally, I wouldn’t suggest this, since I’m usually sympathetic to the importance of philosophy, but when they threaten my biological world, there is only one rational response, and it’s inspired by the MacAskill’s essay. We need to kill all the philosophers. Or, at least, humanely pen them up with their own kind, throwing them occasional lumps of tofu and bales of sprouts, behind soundproof glass walls, so we can occasionally bring our children to the exhibit to watch. “See, kids, this is what will happen to you if you don’t do your biology homework.”
If you’re arguing that the authors intended a bit of Swiftian satire, stop. One of them has replied to me.
So you finally understood that the piece was serious.
You mean that these people were actually serious? Wow.
When I read this yesterday I found myself thinking it was some poorly done variant of “A Modest Proposal”.
Wait, that wasn’t an attempt at reductio ad absurdum. I’m horrified that was actually a suggestion.
That’s appalling. But even more appalling: I understand that Jonathan Swift actually proposed killing and eating Irish babies! You should write a post about that.
It’s disappointing to see a philosopher with such a limited view. Plants also attack animals, and other plants as well. And don’t get me started on those microbes.
The parabola of li-I-I-ife..!
It’s relatively trivial to demonstrate that the most effective solution to alleviating suffering, considered over all time, is simply to completely exterminate all life on Earth. As long as life exists, there will be suffering. The total number of organisms which will exist over the expected habitable lifetime of the Earth is many orders of magnitude larger than the total number of organisms alive today. Therefore, the amount suffering caused by exterminating all organisms currently alive is vastly smaller than the total amount of suffering that will occur in the future if you don’t. QED.
On a related note, I once saw noted celebrity vegetarian Linda McCartney claim that we shouldn’t be hunting deer (in Scotland) because “man shouldn’t interfere with nature”. When it was pointed out to her that, since we’ve exterminated all their predators, deer populations would explode until they ran out of grazing and starved, she said that we should feed them.
Of course, to do that we’d need to bulldoze a lot of wild habitat in order to make room for the additional soybean fields.
they are completely disregarding history. Their proposal: we’ve done that before, and it didn’t turn out too good. Wolves were scourged from American forests, which left us with an annual “thinning of the herds (of deer)”, that encourages people to go out and kill, and buy guns, and even bow hunters to be all violent. Once again embodying “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
We have wild ducks around here. They usually have a clutch of 10 or so ducklings, sometimes twice a year. Imagine what would happen if they all survived.
I read that whole article looking for a hint of sarcasm. Just a glimmer of satire, anything that said “yes, this is an Onion article.” I could not find it. I think that was completely serious.
Vegans are like the Ron Paul fans of the food world. Smug, ignorant and loud.
I think we should actually feed the predators to the prey — it’s a win-win.
How about some large cat cacciatora.
P.S. Honestly, I’ve met vegetarians express coherent thought…
bojac6: I think you need a more sensitive irony meter. For one thing, it never casts what it says as the authors’ opinions, just as a necessary consequence of animal rights activists’ views. For another, it explicitly recognizes the ecological problems caused by predator removal, contrary to PZ’s impression.
Your source is the Onion, right? Tell me your source is the Onion. I mean, I’m aware that vegetarian/vegan philosophy can sometimes get a little wooly around the edges, but this has to be an attempt at parody.
So their overall point is that since we can’t perfectly alleviate suffering, we should feel free to eat meat and not worry about where it came from?
…
Welp.
@14 Athywren
Not the Onion but pretty much guaranteed to be a parody. As evidence see the description of “Doing Good Better” authored by one of the Macaskills.
I think that article is very finely tuned snark.
I read it as pretty explicitly mocking of “animal welfare activists”.
I know better than to put anything past PETA, but they seriously called for that guy to be hanged?
Have they even thought this through? Do they not realize that removing terrestrial predators will only open these niches to other species to adapt and evolve?
It will not be very pleasant to share the forest with roving packs of ravenous land squid.
Looking at the picture accompanying this post, I am imagining MacAskill typing away at this piece in a darkened study somewhere, illuminated only by the glow of his monitor, and completely unaware of the tri-dot laser targeter playing slowly along his spine until it comes to rest on the back of his head. Just after he hits submit and sends the email of his transcript winging to his publisher, a sinister clicking sound disturbs his ruminations…
What about the suffering of plants? Will nobody think of the feelings of the grass as it is savagely cut down, in the prime of life, by roving bands of vicious cows? And what of the feelings of photons which are forced, against their will, to do work for long hours in the sweatshops of heartless leaves conducting photosynthesis? Does nobody care for the photons?
It has to be snark. There is no way this is meant to be taken seriously.
And before anyone asks, Amanda and William Macaskill are indeed armed with what appears to be weapons-grade snark, and so fit the criteria for our cinematic hunter.
Given the fact that the article is entitled To truly end animal suffering, the most ethical choice is to kill wild predators (especially Cecil the lion) I think an assumption that this is snark is reasonable at this point. Why else would you single out Cecil at all?
#10
The essay itself contained no hints of satire, but I still hold out hope that there will be a follow-up post calling it a hoax.
To truly end animal suffering, the most ethical choice is to kill tame philosophers (especially Peter the Singer). And a quick bomb over Oxford that selectively took out the Uehiro Center for Practical Ethics might help. Any chance Dawkins might be visiting at the time?
If it’s real, then my response is “Not all vegetarians.”
david, 21:
I know you’re joking, but your point seems to be that avoiding animal products for ethical reasons is as silly as defending the feelings of plants. That’s not a fair comparison. We have unequivocal evidence that animals have conscience and feel pain (see, for example, the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness), but we can’t say the same about plants. And even if plants had feelings, eating them directly would still cause less suffering than feeding them to animals first and then killing the animals.
PZ Myers,
These professors are in series need of a biology education. I wonder if they’re also creationists of some kind. Seriously you have to be incredibly ignorant or driven by emotions to know why we can’t just get rid of predation in the animal kingdom. Sorry you can argue that its not humane all you want, but that’s just the way it is, and trying to change it will just make it worse, regardless of how you feel about it.
Surely you don’t mean to say that there are vegetarians and vegans out there who don’t know a fucking thing about biology and base their position entirely on the most superficial of emotional responses? For sham………oh…wait, no, that’s most of the vegetarians/vegans i’ve ever met, right there…Even if this article is some form of comedy, this is not far removed from things i’ve heard actual people say.
Even if you eliminate predators and disease…most animals will still die horrible, painful deaths…There’s no getting around it. Without factors that control population growth, populations will explode until resources are depleted and most individuals die a slow, agonizing death due to famine.
The arbitrary importance given to certain vertebrates and the dismissal of pretty much everything else, is very, very telling. But then again, what can you expect from people who think that agriculture causes no animal death/suffering…These are not people with a researched, informed, rational or consistent position. I can absolutely respect a vegetarian/vegan position, and in fact i sympathise with it…it’s just that very rarely do you find someone who has reached that position by respectable means.
In my Environmental Science doctoral program, I had to take two graduate level philosophy classes in Environmental Ethics. The ignorance of basic scientific principles horrified me. In one class, we watched a philosopher who is considered one of the leading environmental philosophers insist that geese felt shame when they had sex, ??? To be totally fair, even the students in my class who were the most biologically ignorant were uncomfortable with this proposition, and found it ludicrous.
The attitude of the philosophy students in this class appeared to be that scientists were responsible for all the bad in the world, and should have no voice in environmental decisions. They protested because scientists taught that humans were not animals, we were above animals. When I asked them what teacher had taught them such nonsense, they stated they had never actually taken science. Where they got this information about what science teachers teach, I have no idea. But any science teacher who taught them this does not belong in a science program. I have never encountered any science teacher who says humans are not animals (though most of the textbooks unfortunately tend to refer to humans and animals; I always use humans and other animals in my lectures).
If this had been my only encounter with philosophy, I would have as little respect for it as the scientists who are dismissing it altogether. Fortunately, I did not take this for the sum total of philosophy, and still have great respect for the field overall.
No, I don’t think this is snark or mocking animal rights activists.
I’m not sure it’s as serious a proposal as PZ thinks it is. I think it is a contemplation of logical extensions of animal rights philosophy. The author realizes this can’t be done and would have consequences. But rather than coming to the logical conclusion that they and other PETA-like animal rights activists are all a bunch of barking lunatics naively pushing a stupid and inconsistent agenda, he concludes they must think “big thoughts” and contemplate the seemingly impossible. In other words they *do* think ending predation is a noble if impractical goal. It’s a critique that animal rights activists don’t think deep enough, rather than the more accurate PETA and its like are barking insane and mind boggling stupid.
===
Unless these guys have university positions, I don’t think it was quite fair for PZ to criticize Philosophy Departments and … oh, Jeff MacMahon, the inspiration for this idiocy, is a professor at Rutgers? Never mind. (God I hope Amanda and William MacAskill don’t teach anywhere.)
Fuck the world is doomed.
How many animals does this dipshit think big cats kill? Also, newsflash: humans are predators, so now what?
drst @ 11:
You know better than to generalize like that, yes?
Hmmm…. maybe it *is* snark… or not.
I don’t know. What else have the MacAskillls written? Jeff McMahan, on the other hand is pure idiot.
I think these two must actually be in the philosophy department at the University of Wallamaloo.
At least, we can all hope that it’s that kind of philosophy.
This has got to be satire — I think it’s modeled on A Modest Proposal.
Okay, I’ve changed my mind. It is snark. A bit of googling on William MacAskill and I find he’s a bit of a philosopher of the “Ha! If you were *really* consistent you’d recognize you can’t go far enough so you shouldn’t do anything” school (because, apparently, being inconsistent is a worse crime than being evil). Jeff McMahan seems to be of the “Nyah, Nyah, I can see your epidermis” school of philosophy.
I’m not really fond of either schools, but I no longer think it was a serious proposal nor a defense.
You must be so proud, PZ.
His vision, from the constantly passing bars
Has grown so weary, it can hold nothing else.
It seems to him, there are a thousand bars,
And behind the bars, no world.
As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
The movement of his powerful soft stride
Is like a ritual dance about a center where
A mighty will stands, paralyzed.
Only at times, the curtain of his pupils lifts quietly.
And image enters in, rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
Plunges into the heart — and is gone.
— Erich Maria Rilke, “The Panther” (1902)
Perhaps philosophers should occasionally listen to poets, too.
chris61 @16:
Looks like a book well worth reading.
That’s the way I remember it was, back when I was a child. Things have obviously gone downhill since then.
I vote for ‘satire,’ but I’m too lazy to look stuff up myself. I defer, as usual, to the comments section on Pharyngula.
The article is a parody intended to inspire people to mock vegans and vegetarians. And from looking at this thread, I’d say it worked exactly as intended. As a lurker who is usually inspired and enlightened by this place, it’s pretty disappointing to read a thread of people saying that I and people like me are dumb because of our dietary choices.
Dunc@6:
THE DALEKS ARE INTRIGUED BY YOUR VIEWS AND WISH TO SUBSCRIBE TO YOUR NEWSLETTER
I dunno. I think this is really a couple of people taking the piss. I’m pretty sure they’re not serious about it.
SC @39: I considered putting “/snark” at the end of my post but didn’t think it necessary. My bad.
toska @43: This is a rough-and-tumble kinda joint. You are of course correct, but don’t expect much in the way of apologies.
In a similar vein, a while back I read a “philosophical”, “ethical” argument that we should eliminate suffering by killing all animals and replacing them with genetically engineered versions that didn’t feel pain. It seemed to be meant seriously, although it was fucking insane.
@toska #43 – I second that. Usually this is how meat eaters shout down their bad consciences. It is a nasty surprise to see it happening here.
I don’t think the article means to mock vegetarianism so much as PETA-like attitude. Not wanting to personally ingest and digest animals seems like a fine and ultimately personal decision. Trying to somehow keep score with it is nuts.
@rietpluim
Or maybe, just maybe, some of us don’t have a bad conscience about it, because we have no reason to.
This particular article may be satire, but the fact is that at least one philosopher has proposed something identical, apparently in all seriousness:
http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/2009/08/28/predatory-animals-are-bad/
As readers of Tetrapod Zoology know, herbivores are not cute friendly harmless creatures like these carnivore-haters seem to think they are– nor are all of them strictly vegan (there are several accounts of cows and deer eating small prey such as birds). Heck, if you want to eliminate all predators, songbirds would have to go as well; they devour so many bugs and worms! A lot of insects wouldn’t be safe either… I’m not sure what would be allowed to survive in a world constructed to fit these utilitarian ideals. Maybe nothing but cyanobacteria photosynthesizing all day long.
In the words of Cicero “There is nothing so absurd that it has not been said by some philosopher.”
@46
I’m familiar with the usual discourse around Pharyngula (I occasionally have periods where I comment more frequently), and I know to expect rough handling, or at the very least, not be surprised by it :)
I’m also not looking for any kind of apologies. I just thought a couple of fellow commenters here could use a reminder that they are talking about actual human beings, and the over generalizing isn’t the least bit helpful. Especially when the generalization is based on one of the strangest strawmen I’ve ever seen.
woozy @49
I 100% agree that trying to keep score is ridiculous. I usually don’t pay attention to PETA because nearly everything they say is ridiculous, so I’m not sure if this article in anyway reflects their standpoints. But in this thread, I don’t see many people mocking PETA. I see them saying things like “most vegans I’ve ever met are stupid,” as if that’s somehow relevant.
Whether this particular tripe is satire or not I cannot say for sure. However, I would actually say they could be serious due to the fact that these arguments have been seriously proposed by such philosophical movements as the Abolitionist project spearheaded by philosopher David Pearce. To find out more about this character here is his wikipedia entry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Pearce_(philosopher)
and his website describes he Abolitionist project in more detail:
http://www.abolitionist.com
Some of the things he talks about are using nanomachines to reengineer ecosystems, contraception to prevent overpopulation and genetically engineering carnivorous traits out of predatory animals. So yes, they are some in the philosophy world who think this is a noble and feasible goal. Frankly, his ideas are a horrifying mixture of human arrogance and creepy control freak tendencies. PZ is right, the natural world would be reduced to a global petting zoo and god knows how ecosystems the world over would react to such meddling. Their ideas are repulsive to me.
Toska @52
Um, you are the one who seems to have overgeneralized that this discussion is somehow about (human) vegetarianism.
Ah, I see Emily has pointed out the lunacy of Pearce already! First heard of this numpty through TetZoo as well.
Rob Grigjanis — Thanks for the link. That puts an interesting perspective on the article.
toska @#43 — “The article is a parody intended to inspire people to mock vegans and vegetarians.” Of course. The authors self-describe as “long-term vegetarians who abstain from meat for ethical reasons” merely to inspire mockery of others. Clever folks. However, I agree with you that some of the comments here are…we might say “surprising.” One person has declared that all vegans are “like Ron Paul” and “smug, ignorant and loud.” My wife is vegan, and I’m mostly vegan, yet I doubt I have ever meet this person. While it’s true that I am smug, ignorant, and loud (sometimes…bad hearing), I wonder how this commenter knows me so well. Perhaps it’s because my first name is “Ron.”
@Toska
If you are refering to my comment, i don’t think they are stupid, i think they have reached their position for very, very bad reasons, which is entirely different.
For those of you suggesting that the article is satire: one of the authors has engaged me on Twitter to defend the idea of reducing suffering by eliminating predators. See this comment:
For every “Modest Proposal” in the eighteenth century, there were a number of poorly-done imitations. Note how Swift lets his satiric mask drop every once in a while so that his real point can shine through. This author A) is clearly writing satire, but B) isn’t very good at it.
I despise PETA. And the “PETA-like attitude” I refer to is the idea that direct suffering of individual animals directly and personal intentions are accountable yet indirect consequences of overall effect are not. e.g. mousetraps are murder yet live trapping the mouse and dumping them in someone elses backyard is not. or hunting goats destroying an islands ecosystem is murder yet letting the island’s entire biodiversity die off resulting in the starvation of the very same goats is desirable because we actively keep our hands clean. etc.
I think this article is *entirely* about that attitude and addresses it directly.
As for “most vegans I know are stupid”…. hmmm, I see that more as “most vegans I know give stupid PETA-like explanations but a I am not woozy and I have different vocabulary so I call this ‘vegan reasoning’ rather than what woozy calls ‘PETA-like attitude'” rather than “people who refuse to eat animal products are stupid”.
@Woozy 55,
I only intended to address one aspect of the conversation (and, by the way, your comments were not what I was referring to. Just fyi), but this will be my last comment. I don’t want to dominate the conversation.
@robro 57,
Fair enough. I may have misread the intent.
@Dreaming of an Atheistic Newtopia 58,
I would encourage you to consider that people make dietary choices for different reasons, and you may not know the exact position of any particular vegan. Beyond that, I’m sorry if vegans in your life are assholes and have shaped the way you think of us. I try to keep my choices to myself, but I know not everyone does.
When I hear the local fox killing a rabbit, I get a bit wibbly. It’s a terrible sound. I remind myself firmly that nature is red and in tooth and claw, and the fox needs to eat, too.
But when the local rabbits ate ALL my sweet corn this year, I admit I started rooting a little harder for the fox.
I mostly describe the rabbits as “those little cottontailed fuckers.” No one who maintains a vegetable garden can honestly like rabbits no matter how adorable their tiny wee fluffy babies are when they hop around the end of the driveway. They are adorable. Truly. Right up until they deny me my hand-pollinated, delicious summer treat that is radically improved by having no more than 5 minutes between picking and cooking.
@Dreaming of an Atheistic Newtopia,
And why do you think the average vegan’s reasons for being so are bad? What is wrong with choosing to not eat animals for ethical reasons? What is wrong with objecting to the way we treat the cows, pigs, and poultry that we eat in this country? What is wrong with finding ag-gag laws… problematic at best?
FYI, I’m not a vegan. I do eat meat. But I don’t at all think the ethical arguments for veganism are bad. And I don’t confuse veganism with PETA (which is the Westboro Baptist Church of veganism; and no, that analogy is not calling veganism a religion, so let me cut that one off right here). And frankly, if this is serious, it’s a position I’d honestly be willing to bet that the overwhelming vast majority of vegans would disagree with.
And I feel quit comfortable making that generalization.
leaving vegetarianism aside for a moment what jumps out of this piece first is how come the carnivores not considered animals when thinking of animal suffering? Why is their suffering just causally pushed aside?
The other thing that jumps out is the unspoken idea that it is up to us to take control of nature as if it were our “god given right” to mastery over creation. As if this was all given to us as we stand separate and above, it shades of “white mans burden”. The whole idea strikes me as trying to re-create the creationist pre-fall garden of Eden.
There may be rational, emotional, physiological and psychological reasons to adopt a vegetarian diet but they are personal to the individual.
The idea presented here is pure unadulterated arrogance plain and simple.
uncle frogy
Wow. So we’ve finally found a group who make creationists look like true scientific scholars. Who even thought that was possible?
@toska
I realise that my last post sounds even more generalised, i’m sorry. I fully recognize that there are vegetarians/vegans out there whose position is legitimate and who i respect. Unfortunately, out of the ones i’ve run into, they are very few. Of course i respect anybody’s choice to make dietary choices for whatever reason they like, it’s just that not everybody’s reasons are rational or reasonable. I have no issue with people being vocal about their choices, but when the reasons they give for them are bad, i reserve the right to point it out.
Really?! :o
Seems to me like some pretty poor philosophizing all the way around.
Forget disease, parasites, and injury, many, if not most, baby animals don’t make it to adulthood because there isn’t enough food. Are we going to alleviate that, too?
I just can’t take it seriously, it reads like bad snark or an attempt to troll PETA (who I despite but that’s a different issue).
The paragraph at the end especially says it to me:
Though the other option is they are play at the game of logical absurdity by suggesting that we can’t be against any sort of killing unless we’re against all of it.
What is going to kill the krill after we put all the blue whales into goldfish bowls? What will we feed the whales? Perhaps soylent green, “now with 50% less Philosopher”.
Obligatory Futurama reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkR2XEYEFgk
Snark or not.
If it isn’t snark, its point seems to be if the point of animals rights is to minimize suffering, we should be *really* thinking about it on a global scale. So either this is a serious chastisement against animal rights activists not going far enough to consider redoing the natural world (which is !insane!); or it is snark in pointing out the logical extension of animal rights is to redo the natural world which is clearly insane. I first assumed the first, then the latter, and now I’m going back to the first. *sigh*
They cite McMahon who seems to be more interested in forcing us to admit that we should *want* to eliminate carnivorous animals despite any inability to actually do so. Apparently it’s the getting us to *admit* we think lions and bears are bad is more important to him than any practical things we actually do or don’t do. This is why I call him “Nyah, nyah, your epidermis is showing school”.
Obviously I *don’t* want to eliminate carnivorous animals and I *don’t* think carnivorous animals are bad. Oh ho! So I like suffering do I? Relieving suffering is not the most important philosophic aim to me, is it? Well. *yes* reducing suffering is *not* the most important philosophical aim to me and allowing suffering to continue unchanged is *infinitely* preferable to any weird genetic tinkering to modify, muck-up and completely overturn the natural world.
You know. It *is* okay to say “I don’t know” and to accept you simply don’t have some of the answers. A world without suffering is literally inconceivable at this point so it is okay to say “well, i’m sorry about the pain in the world and I don’t know what I’m going to do about it, but if you think we should to reduce wild carnivores you are fucking nuts”.
@65 uncle frogy
I think they are suggesting we humanely reduce their numbers until we can genetically alter them so that they don’t need to kill and we terraform the world to not need the results of their killing and/or to feed them bioengineered animals incapable of thought and without pain centers.
Seriously.
They believe this is a reasonable multi-century goal.
I suppose if you assume elimination of suffering and pain is the most important goal this makes sense, but if so, I think this demonstrates one of the problems with reductionist all-or-nothing philosophies.
@drst #11: while it is true that too many vegans are air-headed hippies with a filmsy grasp on reality, there are plenty who are rational, knowledgeable and have thought things through.
As a failed vegetarian, I cannot understand why people get so smugly defensive when considering harm reduction.
If you accept evolution, you accept that differences between human and non-human animals are laid in a continuum, there is no sharp line to divide the two groups.
Because of that, if you accept that suffering should be minimized for humans, you should at the very least be open to the idea that suffering should be reduced for some non-human animals.
Regardless of suffering, environmental impact and sustainability should be pretty big factors for any secular humanist.
TFA strikes me as a “gotcha” kind of thing, but the arguments are idiotic at best so I don’t care enough to do my own research, I will just trust PZ that the idiocy is real.
Wait, this is serious?
Goodness…
One thing I teach my kids is that nature is a cruel place where most things die young and in pain.
There’s too many fluffy bunnies on TV, too many anthropomorphised smart prey that constantly outwits the predador (which apparently does eat grass, or how come Wiley Coyotee is still alive?)
97% of bunny rabbits don’t see a second summer and hunting is only one issue alongside starvation, disease, accidents…
Suppose we encounter an advanced civilization that has engineered a happy biosphere. Population sizes are controlled by cross-species immunocontraception. Free-living herbivores lead idyllic lives in their wildlife parks. Should we urge the reintroduction of starvation, asphyxiation, disemboweling and being eaten alive by predators? Is their regime of compassionate stewardship of the biosphere best abandoned in favour of “re-wilding”? I suspect the advanced civilization would regard human pleas to restore the old Darwinian regime of “Nature, red in tooth and claw” as callous if not borderline sociopathic.
Biodiversity? Genome-editing technologies now promise greater genetic and behavioral diversity than was ever possible under a regime of natural selection. Not least, we can use biotech to cross gaps in the fitness landscape prohibited by natural selection. Intelligent agency can “leap across” fitness gaps and create a living world where sentient beings don’t harm each other.
So long as humans cause untold suffering by factory-farming and slaughterhouses, talk of compassionate stewardship of Nature is probably fanciful. Yet what should be our long-term goal? The reason for discussing the future of predation now is that some conservationists (and others) think we should support “re-wilding”, captive breeding programs (etc) for big cats and other pro-predator initiatives. Ethically speaking, do we want a world where sentient beings harm each other or not?
(“Reprogramming Predators” – http://www.abolitionist.com/reprogramming/index.html
was written before the era of CRISPR and “gene drives”; but I think the general point stands.)
I tried reading this whole thread, but gave up around #40, so if someone else has made this point, sorry for the duplication.
The article ends thus:
I think they are making a serious point that you tie yourself into ethical knots if you treat all animals as if they are people in furry or feathery coats. So, no they are not joking, but they also don’t actually advocate the “solutions” they arrived at. They explicitly call their conclusions thought experiments.
Of course, they are also ignoring the fact that Cecil had a tracking collar, and thus the killing of him damaged a scientific study. THAT is what I’m most unhappy about.
look David who the hell put us in the position where what we personally find ethical we should impose on all of nature?
Can we not follow the advice to medicine of first do no harm?
This natural world , how ever you want to characterize it, is what we find ourselves in. We arose out of it and are intimately a part of it. We have just barely begun to understand how the natural world works as a system.
The whole idea reeks of putting clothes on animals for modesty so as not to expose their genitals.
uncle frogy
An actual attempt to cull large predators and the results.
http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/news/2014/03/dingo-culls-cause-more-harm-than-good
Not so great.
Frankly years from now when fake meat will be common, cheaper, healthier, and better than real meat we will be looking back at our current lifestyle as barbaric and wondering how we ever thought caging and slaughtering animals to feed ourselves was acceptable.
The limits of human empathy has been constantly widening. The vast majority of Americans would be aghast at the idea of eating dog or horse meat so there is no reason that this empathy would not soon enough grow to encompass cows and chickens.
The only barrier currently is convenience, and once fake meat eliminates the convenience problem, it’s inevitable that real meat would cease to be eaten.
@77 David Pearce said:
No, it does not.
1) It is an error to assume this advanced civilization and ours would share a definition of “happiness.” Additionally, calling a biosphere “happy” is a category error. Only things capable of feeling emotion may experience (what we call) happiness, and there are many things in a biosphere that have no proven capacity for experiencing emotion. Additionally, calling any population “happy” is a hasty generalization: populations are not averages. You can talk about the prior odds of a sample of the population having a trait, but any assertion about the population is falsifiable by counterexample taken from the population in question.
2) Free-living herbivores leading (a human idea of) idyllic lives would still suffer. Many animals (herbi-, carni-, omni- and others) will fight each other for reasons that have nothing to do with food. E.g., there are many species of herbivores where males physically contest with each other during mating season, and these contests can result in injury or death. To extend the reasoning, we must also modify these species to not fight for any reason; they must be docile and do nothing but sustain themselves; breed; and die, because allowing any other behaviour allows the risk of suffering. Even breeding and eating allow for suffering. How do you eliminate that?
3) The second paragraph strikes me as nothing but hand-waving over problems the author lacks the background to address. Life is complicated, so assuming we can just “fix it” is a great example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
4) The last sentence of the last paragraph rests on the idea that either “re-wilding” will only be done with sentient beings, or that anything re-wilded is by definition sentient. Can this be shown to be true? What about things not assumed/proven to be sentient? E.g., worms; many species from rodents to birds prey on worm species. Is that allowed?
There is a lingering feeling of “capacity = obligation” about many of these arguments. The underlying assumption seems to be that because we have the capacity to act to reduce suffering, we are therefore obligated to do so in all instances. This strikes me as an unsupported premise.
It’s clearly a thought experiment. In fact, they already consider the complaints about how it would affect the ecosystem (which is what most complaints are about).
we should be very careful before undertaking any sort of large-scale intervention that may have unforeseen consequences.
But these issues can be set aside for the purposes of this thought experiment.
Unclefrogy, humans already intervene in Nature in countless ways from uncontrolled habitat-destruction to captive breeding programs to “re-wilding”. All that’s in question are the ethical principles – if any – that should guide our interventions. Should the suffering of individuals carry any weight? Or should conservation biologists concern themselves primarily with the “health” of taxonomic abstractions?
Risks?
Yes! For example, phasing out Plasmodium-transmitting species of Anopheles mosquito may have far-reaching ecological implications. Malaria is estimated to have killed around half the humans who ever lived
(cf. http://www.nature.com/news/2002/021003/full/news021001-6.html)
as well as killing and sickening countless nonhumans.
So should we leave members of other ethnic groups in sub-Saharan to their fate? Or aim to plan intelligently and compassionately ahead for a happy biosphere?
The following sentences in the above comments should be quotes from the article:
[Jaw hits ground]
Poe’s law: it isn’t just for creationists any more.
If you predate on predators, you become a predator and then you have a logical suicide!
@Shikko, 82: 2) Free-living herbivores leading (a human idea of) idyllic lives would still suffer.
We’d really have to micromanage every aspect of the environment, to truly eliminate all animal suffering. Aside from modifying the animals to remove any vestige of territorial instinct or aggression, we’d have to somehow prevent accidental injuries and deaths (or swoop in to euthanize anything unlucky enough to e.g. fall off a cliff), probably control the climate to keep it amenable to these creatures and their food plants, make sure that no plants evolved toxins or otherwise became inedible, eliminate all pathogens– and keep them from re-evolving somehow. Then what happens if we humans go extinct? Or some other outside factor screws up this delicate artificial Eden? Whatever animals survive in our absence will revert to the old status quo in a few eons.
Before even considering such a project on a global scale, we’d have to achieve an unheard-of level of cooperation between nations, plus some substantial advances in technology. The cost, in time and money, would be staggering. Perhaps I’m a pessimist, but I can’t see this being remotely feasible for humanity (as opposed to hypothetical omnipotent super aliens), even if we consider it a worthwhile goal.
David
What does “health” of taxonomic abstractions mean to you?
I have no grand plan as to what we should do. I do know that up till now all most the only thing we have ever considered is what we want or what was best for us. Usually that is in the short term and specifically by those who are going to benefit directly making what ever action is considered.
. That has been the pattern through out history any other consequences or effects long term were never considered mostly because we were just unaware of them. While we know more today we are finding out more all the time how everything is connected and effects travel far from any narrow geographic area wide in the rest of the planet. We still just barely consider any of it.
uncle frogy
The problem isn’t that they’re running an impossible thought experiment, but that they’re not clearly stating their intent. “Let’s kill all carnivores to decrease suffering” is as ridiculous an idea as advocating for one and one not really adding up to two, and that’s always going to be the case. Explaining why exactly there’s universal agreement to that might not be as easy, and might be worth doing (to clarify the issues involved, because hopefully whatever we find can be applicable elsewhere). It’s like with pseudoscience: we all agree what counts for one (homeopathy, astrology, etc). But why that’s obvious is not obvious, and clarifying things has certainly benefited both scientists and philosophers.
But, a) they didn’t clearly state that intent, probably because, b) their intent was, “Hmm, we desperately need to write about something to grab people’s attention. So let’s come up with an outrageous thought experiment, and let it be deeply patronizing to animal rights activists”. Which is a shitty reason to write a paper.
I’ve been vegan for 20+ years and I don’t love being called smug and ignorant. I mean, it’s pretty nice, but I don’t love it. (The smugness, ignorance, mean-spiritedness, and bad jokes I’ve heard from meat-eaters over the years could fill volumes. But I’m not quite ready to insult them all.)
I still think the piece is a goof. They might claim (for now) that it’s serious, but I think we’ll being trolled.
*we’re being trolled.
And I even used “preview”!
Then why are they typing an essay instead of killing predators? If they don’t take their ethical reasoning seriously enough to act on it, why should I take it seriously?
I’m a bit confused here, PZ. The article never claimed that we should go in right now and kill all predators – of course that would have a disastrous effect on the ecosystem in so many ways, as you pointed out in your post! So it seems a bit dishonest to describe the philosophers as completely ignorant of biology. The philosophers’ claim is that if we can eliminate predation without causing comparable suffering, then we ought to. It might be that we can never do so, because biology and ecology is just too complicated. That’s perfectly compatible with their argument, and I’m sure they’d agree with that.
It’s still a bold claim they’re making! But they’ve argued for it, and it seems pretty reasonable to me. All the objections in this thread (why aren’t they doing it themselves, if they think it’s right; it’s such a long-term goal that we shouldn’t think about it at all; nature is naturally cruel so it’s not our problem) are frankly awful, philosophically speaking.
Y’all got trolled. I knew 3 paragraphs in that this was just sloppy satire. You may all now return to the horrific subjugation of non-human animals to satisfy your gluttony. There is no need to shake your fists at PETA and bad, obscure writers.
What I find interesting is the fact that “re-wilding” will occur natually anyway; if the hypothetical “happy biosphere” is left to its own devices for long enough, carnivores would naturally emerge.
This would be an example of the ‘smug, ignorant’ vegan / vegetarian.
That essay is either parody, or else it (intentionally or not) implicitly calls for the extermination of meat-eating humans. Humans are animals, & are the top predators on the planet. Therefore, way to accomplish what the essay advocates would require killing all meat-eating people.
It sure does feel good being smug in this case as i watch you fools trip over yourselves. I am, however, a little miffed that the corpse of poor Cecil is still being strung up to fuel some of the most inane grandstanding that i have ever seen in my life. And, for the record, I’m a vegan, not one of those useless vegetarians.
Please, please, please. Give this people, a polite, thorough, serious, long list of objections.
We have enough morons trying to kill us all as it is.
This piece of nonsense, assuming it is not bad satire, is compulsively funny in that it indicates that some Animal Rights people and Vegetarians have a deep hatred of Nature and a overweening belief in Human superiority. Thus like in the early part of Genesis Man is given dominion over the Earth in order to subjugate it. In this case to rape it and destroy it in order to create an absurd disneyfied idiocy.
Frankly the sheer unbridled arrogance of this takes my breath away.
This conversation doesn’t need more disingenuous pseudo-intellectual bullshit. Either have the courage to advocate an argument you believe in or take your Spock role playing session to a Star Trek BBS where it belongs.
@Ryan Cunningham, 101
Um, but Sean did argue for a position that he explicitly said he finds reasonable…
Man, just from the article I would be sure this was satire. Poe’s Law is still in effect I guess.
If I’m to take this seriously, then this is just further evidence that a purely consequentialist metaethics is nonsensical. If you’re not married to some kind of reductionist utilitarianism that tries to treat ethical judgments like physics problems, then this “problem” they’ve posed doesn’t even make sense. The MacAskills’ article isn’t wrong; it’s not even wrong.
@Ryan Cunningham, 101
Sorry if my wording seemed disingenuous. Phrases like “I’m a bit confused” are a quirk of philosophical language. Generally they stand in for phrases like “you’re being ridiculously uncharitable here”, or “you’ve totally missed the point”. The aim is to make explicit that I might just have misunderstood you and I’m open for you to clarify your position.
In any case, I thought I made it clear that I’m more or less convinced by the argument in the article, even if I’ve got serious reservations about whether it’ll ever be possible to put it into practice.
@103, biogeo
All ethical concerns reduce to consequentialism. If you think there is some other concern to take into account, I’d like to hear it. And I’ll probably be able to tell you how it actually reduces to consequentialism anyways :P
Brian Pansky @105:
Sadly, it’s late where I am, and I don’t have the time to engage in an argument on metaethics, though I imagine we’d both enjoy it. Suffice to say, I used to be a pure utilitarian, so I’m somewhat familiar with strategies for recasting deontological, virtue, or other metaethical positions in consequentialist terms. I gave it up when I decided I couldn’t harmonize it with a few fundamental moral intuitions that I’m unwilling to abandon. Among these, 1) I believe I have a greater moral duty to others on the basis of the nature and strength of our relationship, even if this this may incur a moral cost to others outside those relationships, and that this duty is not readily subject to reasoning about “net happiness”; 2) there are certain fundamental principles which I believe are inviolate, such as personal autonomy, irrespective of any moral calculus on the basis of net happiness or suffering; 3) I believe happiness and suffering are fundamentally subjective experiences, and the utilitarian project to reason about “net” happiness presumes some common currency by which the experiences of two individuals may be compared — I think that attempting to reason about whether an act is right on wrong on the basis of whether Smith’s resultant happiness is greater than Jones’s resultant unhappiness is an attempt to compare incomparables. As a corollary to these, I think there are many situations in which a uniquely correct moral judgment simply doesn’t exist; some actions may be impermissible and some may be permissible, but there is no identifiable ordering function over the permissible actions that allows a unique moral judgment to be made. Put another way, I think many moral decisions are satisficing, rather than optimizing, problems.
Nevertheless, I do think consequentialist/utilitarian reasoning is very useful for a wide range of moral judgments, just not all of them, and not as a source of metaethics. Attempting to apply it as metaethics leads to some very strange places, including the one laid out in the MacAskills’ article.
Anyway, I’ve got to turn in for the night, but if you have a response I’ll look forward to it in the morning!
Any animal capable of suffering is also capable of joy/bliss/happiness/well-being/etc. Eliminating one, even humanely, eliminates all the future joy and happiness that it might have experienced for the remainder of its life. Thus, how much happiness and so forth would you eliminate from the universe as the cost of your attempt to remove suffering, and which side of the ledger will be the greater?
“Consider the cost!” applies to philosophy just as much as it does to economics.
@107, biogeo
But there’s no reason why that matters.
Marcello S
Yep, because only one side is ever engaged in hasty generalisations etc.
Amphiox
Non sequitur. Being able to suffer does not mean being able to be “happy” for a human definition of “happiness”. Capable of being well? Yep.
Yes, and? Does that mean we should no longer euthanise a suffering pet because there might be 15 minutes within the next 6 months of pain and suffering where the pet is content? It’s one of those things I envy pets for: That they can be given a quick and clean death to end their suffering. I watched my grandma die over a year, going from bad to worse. It was not something you’d think of as humane when done to a dog.
Emily, no one is proposing a Five-Year Plan. Rather, the debate is over the long-term future of the rest of the living world. We’re not going to run out of computational resources. Later this century and beyond, every cubic metre of the planet will be computationally accessible to surveillance and micro-management. Do we want sentient beings to hurt, harm and kill each other? Why? Because it’s “natural”? Should we spend time, effort and resources encouraging [non-human] serial killers? Alternatively, are some life-forms best allowed to go extinct in the wild?
Unclefrogy, four options:
1) “Pleistocene rewilding” – restoring much of the planet to its state before the human impact.
2) The status quo – essentially an extension of existing conservation biology: more wildlife parks, minimal intervention – conservation with no regard to the subjective well-being of individuals, just the abstract health of species and ecosystems.
3) Compassionate biology, ultimately extending to all free-living sentients: cross-species fertility regulation via immunocontraception, GPS-tracking and monitoring, genetic tweaking and/or in vitro meat for obligate carnivores, a pan-species welfare state in tomorrow’s Nature reserves: in short, “high-tech Jainism”.
(4) “Why improve nature when destroying it is so much easier” (cf. http://archive.is/HbE2a)
Which is the most ethically responsible choice?
Shikko
(1) For reasons we do not understand, the pleasure-pain axis would seem common to all sentient life. Thus the opioid-dopamine system is strongly evolutionarily conserved; compare its function in say, humans and flatworms. No, we can’t defeat radical scepticism about other minds. But complications aside, sentient beings don’t want to be harmed. “A happy biosphere”? As an ultra-nominalist, I agree with you. Saying “A living world where sentient beings don’t undergo the biology of suffering” is just more of a mouthful.
(2) What kind of timescale have you in mind? Like humans, nonhuman animals flourish best when free-living but not “wild”. Take for example the SCN9A gene. Nonsense mutations of SCN9A induce congenital pain-insensitivity. Other alleles induce abnormally high or abnormally low pain-sensitivity. CRISPR and “gene drives” potentially allow intelligent moral agents to choose the level of physical suffering undergone by members of other species – and indeed our own. This example could be multiplied with each of our core emotions. Testosterone function and the spectrum of behaviour androgenic hormones promote can be modulated too – for good or ill. The biggest challenge here is ethical-ideological – or rather status quo bias – not ultimately technical, although the technical challenges are immense.
(3) Some forms of biodiversity are presumably best eradicated. How many of the several hundred allelic variants of the cystic fibrosis gene should we conserve? No one disputes that life is complicated. But sometimes we can still give a simple answer to a bioethical question: in this case, “zero”. Preimplantation genetic screening can eventually get rid of cystic fibrosis altogether. By contrast, perhaps other forms of genetic and behavioural diversity should be promoted. Genome-editing technologies promise unprecedented diversity in tomorrow’s wildlife parks and (controversially) humans and transhumans. (cf. “Genetically engineering almost anything”: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/evolution/crispr-gene-drives/)
“Dunning-Kruger”? No one is proposing that tomorrow’s wildlife parks should be run by philosophers.
(4) The margins of sentience are complicated. Presumably, compassionate stewardship starts with large long-lived vertebrates. You say, “The underlying assumption seems to be that because we have the capacity to act to reduce suffering, we are therefore obligated to do so in all instances.” Yes indeed. Suppose we come across a screaming toddler from a different ethnic group drowning in a shallow pond. Choosing not to rescue the toddler would be almost as bad as if one had pushed the toddler into the water oneself. Now consider the plight of members of others species whose sentience and sapience is comparable to human toddlers. Should we leave them to their fate? Does suffering matter less because it’s undergone by members of other taxa? Why? Until recently, Gautama Buddha’s plea “May all that hath life be delivered from suffering” was just utopian dreaming. The biotech revolution turns such high-minded sentiments into long-term policy options. Humans can’t be trusted not to screw things up further. This is why we need well-informed debate.
But to labour the obvious: until humans stop systematically harming sentient beings in factory-farms and slaughterhouses, talk of systematically helping them is mostly fanciful.
If we could do so, then to do so would involve literally destroying the entire natural environmenntal world and recreating an artificial one under our control.
The reason we would apparently want to do that if we could seem to be:
A. Our human ethic believes the elimination of suffering is more important than allowing the natural world to continue.
The reason we would not want to do this if we could is:
B. Our human ethic believes allowing the natural world to continue is more important than the elimination of suffering.
I suppose this is a case of gakxz1’s (@90) disagreement about whether 1 + 1 =2.
Funny. I thought “I’m a bit confused” meant one was a bit confused.
Then you are a fucking insane idiot.
I’m astounded at how many people on this thread have stated or implied that they’re vegan.
A 2008 study found that 0.5% of Americans are vegan. If the percentage were the same here, that would be about half of a single response on this thread.
Maybe we are loud (he said smugly)…
woozy
Please don’t do that. There are enough insults for you to use without shaming people with mental illness.
@biogeo
Well I basically agree with you. But I ground all of those conclusions on the simple foundation of satisfying my own desires. Which is consequentialism, so that’s where their validity lies.
@111, woozy:
First, I’m not sure what you mean when you say that it’s a choice between eliminating suffering and preserving the “natural world”. We’re a part of the natural world, just as much as lions and tigers, and the decisions we make are “natural” decisions. Of course there’s a serious concern that when we tinker with the world we might get it wrong with disastrous consequences. But assuming we could get it right, I don’t see the problem.
Second, gakxz1 (@90), who you seem to agree with, said this: ““Let’s kill all carnivores to decrease suffering” is as ridiculous an idea as advocating for one and one not really adding up to two, and that’s always going to be the case”. But I disagree that it’s as ridiculous an idea as that. It’s certainly a very unusual idea, but the authors of the article argue for it at length. Many ideas are both unusual and true.
Both of you appear to think that the authors of the linked article are exploring why it’s ridiculous to kill (or re-work, or segregate) all carnivores to reduce suffering. But I think that’s just a misreading. I think they genuinely believe that we ought to do that, given the capability. So we can’t just dismiss their point out of hand (or at least we can ignore such cavalier dismissals as being a waste of time).
Finally, I don’t appreciate being called a “fucking insane idiot”. Aside from it being an ugly ableist slur, I’ve been nothing but polite in my posts, I haven’t yet hit the traditional three-post count, and I’m not saying anything that marginalizes oppressed groups (at least I hope I’m not). There’s no reason to go all frothing at the mouth just because I disagree with you or PZ.
I do not see how this idea can be defended but here it being defended
We humans emerged out of the natural world but a few million years and now dominate it at the suffrage of the microbes.
The processes of life and evolution have been going on for very much longer. and will continue long after we fade into history. The proposal is to completely over turn the natural processes and replace them with ones of our own design because the natural world and it’s processes offends our sensibilities.
that is what is being defended this is Alice in Wonderland talking to the Red Queen.
I’m surprised no one added that maybe when we figure out how to live forever we should not extend that to all the animals we like also.
From my experience the animals I have had that died felt the pain and at times the fear and confusion that there bodies were doing that but did not seem to go through any where near the self-conscious suffering people do. Yes they died as will I much sooner than I would prefer but dead none the less. I just hope I can live in the moment with all the passion that is required as well the other animals.
uncle frogy
All the world’s
a stagea zoo,And all the people are its keepers.
Welcome to the Anthropocene.
I think a world without predators is a lovely vision, and worth discussing serously. I’m also reminded of one of Arthur C. Clarke’s laws: “When a distinguished…*scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
*omitted “and elderly” in deference to the non-elderly PZ!
Because mass starvation of overpopulated grazers every once in a while is simply fun.
It might not be satire, but in the article they refer to it as a ‘thought experiment’ and use the subjunctive clause all the time. To interpret that article as “the MacAskills actually think that predators should be killed” seems ridiculous to me. It’s pretty clear that they’re saying if you start with concept X and follow it strictly to its logical conclusions, you end up with Y. And that’s the bit they’re serious about, not that they personally believe it should be done.
Same thing struck me listening to a Sam Harris podcast last week – he was saying if you’re against torture, then you’re against torture in this (ridiculous and never occuring outside of a script for the show 24) situation, in which it might be reasonable.
They’re legitimate arguments, in a way, but kind of boring. Yes, if I followed my reasons for being a vegetarian to their full logical conclusion, I wouldn’t have a leather belt on and I wouldn’t have just eaten a cheese sandwich. Yes, if I know with 100% certainty that torturing this guilty person would prevent a mass murder, I’d be for it. The interesting questions, to me at least, aren’t at the endpoints The interesting questions are things like how much effort or discomfort am I willing to go through to be more morally consistent, how close to 100% does the knowledge need to be, how close to 100% effective do the ‘ enhanced interrogation techniques’ need to be, and so forth.
A world without predators is an incredibly poor world, desolated by droughts, minimal biodiversity, suffering, starvation, disease, brutal competition….
Giliell, hence the case for cross-species fertility regulation (via immunocontraception etc) in tomorrow’s wildlife parks in preference to starvation, predation and disease.
Davis Pearce
Call me again when we’ve solved this whole factory farming shit, and global warming, and not to mention war, famine and so on. Once we’Re past that we can discuss micro-managing every single aspect of every single animal’s life.
Giliell, first tackling the horrors for which humans are directly responsible is precisely what I was urging above. The reason for having this debate now rather than later is that some humans believe we should support captive breeding programs for large predators, “re-wilding”, and so forth. Should our long-term goal be to promote predation and the biology of suffering – or not?
Our long term goal should be to preserve biodiversity and promote viable ecosystems. That includes predators.
Any philosophical musings that doesn’t look at reality, such as science, for answers to their musings is junk philosophy. Predators are needed for properly functioning ecosystems. Any philosophical musings that goes against such reality can properly be ignored.
David Pearce
Gimme a time frame when you can develop your grazer utopia.
And tell me why we shouldn’t care about a healthy predator/prey ratio as a means of population control in the meantime. We know that sharks are essential for the survival of coral reefs, so until you magic your garden Eden into existence, I’m going to root for the sharks*. Not that I’m sold on the idea of eventually terminating them, mind you.
*Yes, I wanna see healthcare distributed to all fish, crabs, mussles and each and every shrimp throughout the oceans. That sounds like totally realistic. Or were you just talking about those parts of nature you can see?
Giliell, why are you ignoring the plight of plankton?
Sorry, just liked the alliteration.
Mother Gaia by humon
http://humon.deviantart.com/art/Mother-Gaia-207388674
(1) Most philosophers decided long ago that straight Utilitarianism was too simple a theory to give conclusions acceptable to most people. I’ve written an essay myself showing that one common type of Utilitarianism would imply the moral obligation to commit suicide for anyone whose life prospects for happiness were below average.
(2) In two hundred years there will be three species remaining on planet Earth: Humans, cockroaches, and algae. Among humans, there will be a slave class, who eat the cockroaches and algae, and a master class, who eat the slaves. And all of them will be Christian.
@David Pearce, 110: What do you mean by “computationally accessible”? And I’ll reiterate my earlier points: how are we going to prevent suffering caused by disease, territorial conflict, and random accidents? Predators are not the only thing that harms animals, and herbivores themselves are not innocent of doing harm to other creatures. Some of them are even partially carnivorous:
http://io9.com/field-cameras-catch-deer-eating-birds-wait-why-do-deer-1689440870
@Nerd, 126: Any philosophical musings that doesn’t look at reality, such as science, for answers to their musings is junk philosophy.
Agreed! It’s just (vegan) pie in the sky. I’m reminded of a philosophy professor who said, when I mentioned that philosophical theories of consciousness should be influenced by neuroscience, “who cares about the brain?”
@Gilliell, 127: *Yes, I wanna see healthcare distributed to all fish, crabs, mussles and each and every shrimp throughout the oceans. That sounds like totally realistic.
Including the deep-sea regions which we barely understand (also cave ecosystems, probably remote jungles too). There are likely millions of species we haven’t discovered, let alone worked out their ecology in detail.
And as an addendum to my above comment: predators frequently go for old, weak, or already-injured animals. So in many cases they might be preventing suffering– without them, those animals would die a slow, miserable death rather than a relatively quick one.
Emily, should we welcome human predators who put the old and the sick out of their misery? Unlike futurists such as Ray Kurzweil, I don’t believe we’re heading for some kind of Technological Singularity. But the exponential growth of computer power and micro-miniaturization in robotics and nanotechnology delivers extraordinary power over Nature: http://www.terasemjournals.org/GNJournal/GN0103/img_kurweil/kurzslide18.JPG
Take a disease such as malaria, which blights the lives of countless human and nonhuman animals alike today. With recognisable extensions of existing technologies, we could wipe out malaria altogether (cf. Gene Drives” And CRISPR Could Revolutionize Ecosystem Management”:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/gene-drives-and-crispr-could-revolutionize-ecosystem-management/)
Accidents? For large herbivores, neurochipping and GPS-tracking, later this century, marine nanobots (etc). High-technology vastly amplifies the effects of even minimal benevolence – which in the case of humans is very minimal indeed admittedly. But most of us aren’t malevelent.
Once again, this debate is about responsibly planning the long-term future of the biosphere – not (I hope!) some madcap scheme to go out and massacre predators.
Why do we believe that small children from other ethnic groups don’t deserve to starve or be asphyxiated, disembowelled or eaten alive, but beings of comparable sentience and sapience from other species deserve to be left to their fate? Evolution via natural selection has biased our moral responses. Impartial benevolence is not a recipe for reproductive success on the African savanna. However, a growing minority of bioethicists believe that our long-term goal should be a world where sentient beings don’t harm each other. CRISPR genome-editing and “gene drives” offer the tools to make such lofty goals a reality. (cf. http://www.wired.com/2015/07/crispr-dna-editing-2/) Whether we use biotech to support compassionate stewardship of the rest of the living world or simply re-enact the traditional Darwinian horror-story will ultimately be an (un)ethical choice.
@David Pearce(#77):
Aside from that we will never encounter your hypothetical there is one problem with your utopia. There can be no evolution to prevent species optimizing to their environment which would eventually include predation since meat (or it’s equivalents) contains more energy then plants. So the moment we would encounter it, it would be destroyed by accidental contamination by invasive species (anything from bacteria up) that will adapt to be better at survival in your utopia then the current crop of ‘perfect’ species.
Not hurting each other? Just by existing they are hurting others since they consume resources that could have been used by others. Yes the only way to not hurt others is by not existing.
Suffering comes in many forms. Including starvation due to for example overgrazing since a zealot like you wiped out the natural predators of said herbivores.
You should really read a few of the more prominent buddhist philosphers on this. I’ll give you the short version of it; Vegetarianism or veganism is to be practiced since it reduces suffering. The keyword here is reduces. not eliminates which is impossible.
“We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others.” (La Rochefoucauld).
Who Cares, obesity has now overtaken under-nutrition as a global health problem.
(cf. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/9742960/Obesity-killing-three-times-as-many-as-malnutrition.html)
We aren’t going to run out of food, either for humans or nonhumans. Fertility regulation can replace starvation, predation and disease. The in vitro meat revolution is imminent too.
You remark, “Just by existing they are hurting others.” In a Darwinian world, one person’s gain is indeed frequently another person’s loss. But mastery of our reward circuitry promises to change the rules of the game. We’re not going to run out of the substrates of pleasure. The topic for another post, perhaps.
@David Pearce(#133):
You are demanding mindcontrol through technology. Oh not just mind control, reproductive control as well and not just for humans (hello Brave New World) but every single being, down to krill, on the planet. Then there is the niggling problem of having a centralized something deciding these things. I wonder how many pairs of left boots the polit bureau will claim are needed for the next year.
There is a reason that the Malthusian model for human growth was taken seriously. We’ve seen in the wild what happens when a prey species gets released in an environment without something to be prey for. To put it succintly having a predator around reduces the amount of suffering and not just for the prey species it predates on but everything else in the environment as well since the everything else doesn’t get driven out by an ever expanding population of a prey species or the eventual ecological devastation the overpopulation of this prey species causes.
I’d like you to show me these beings that are comparable to humans in sapience. And if you mean similar to human kid, why should we care? To prevent those things from happening we’d have to imprison these species and in quite a few cases separate them from each other as well.
Interesting. For an idea with no practical or plausible applications whatsoever. I think I will spend more time on trying to reform factory farming and monoculture ag practices and will worry about monkeys flying out of my butt when, you know, monkeys are flying out of my butt.
@David Pearce(#135):
Nice dodge there. You bypassed the problem that is evolution there as pointed out in my post #134.
So I’ll reiterate it.
How are you going to prevent a species from evolving. There is a great benefit to get out of the straight jacket you try to stuff species in, especially when you remove their predators.
Nice attempt at deflection. The original point still stands. I COULD benefit from those other resources were it not that another person used them. That means that I’ve been hurt by that other person because I CANNOT benefit from resources used by them. The only way for me not to be hurt is by that other person not existing.
That is really the crux of their proposal: eliminate evolution and create a static biosphere of our choosing.
They propose meddling in the reproduction and even DNA of all life on the planet to create a biosphere that would quickly succumb to mass die off as soon as we were unwilling or unable to maintain our total control over everything. Their proposal is horrific in its implications and they think that it is somehow morally preferable to the billions of years of history that life on this planet has under its belt.
I just went out for a short birding walk, with this discussion in my mind. I’m not sure that any avian species I saw is not a “nonhuman serial killer.” Not just the raptors and kingfishers, but the tiny songbirds that eat insects and worms. Even species that primarily eat seeds will occasionally kill other birds over nesting spaces or territory (House Sparrows are notorious for this). And of course there are more subtle harms, such as brood parasitism– even those species that don’t actively destroy eggs or young are putting a strain on their hosts.
Do none of these birds– or thousands of other species– deserve to live?
For that matter, I’m wondering why plants would be excluded from the moral calculus. They respond to stimuli as much as some primitive animals (e.g. sponges, jellyfish) do, and some even use chemical signals to communicate when attacked:
http://www.wired.com/2013/12/secret-language-of-plants/
And then there’s carnivorous plants, not to mention toxic ones that cause pain when eaten or even touched.
In any case, dividing the animal kingdom into Bambi and Godless Killing Machines is ridiculous.
@David Pearce, 133: Emily, should we welcome human predators who put the old and the sick out of their misery?
I do support physician-assisted euthanasia as an option for the terminally ill, if that’s what you’re asking. Animals of course can’t consent to this the way people can, but nor could they consent to massive genetic modification.
Your proposal might make for interesting science-fiction, but I can’t see it being viable in the real world. I don’t see how invoking nanobots as a panacea is much better than Singularity techno-rapturism.
A nice pithy phrase with zero content, in which all scientists saying X cannot happen are neatly dismissed.
Oh of course. No mention of the fact that it is impossible at the scale required, nor the fact that it has been geared towards mammals exclusively so far with no progress elsewhere. Handwave, handwave.
Her argument doesn’t even remotely imply this. We humans can debate the ethics of our behavior, the rest of animalia can’t. Ah, and I see you use Kurzweil as a credible source; no wonder you greatly overstimate the reach of technology.
Down to bacteria. Anyone that wishes to control their reproduction is a loon.
In the distant future, the best option is to TAKE OVER all of nature via infective nanomachines that control the entire biosphere using an AI that manages everything to actually MAKE nature as all-knowing and “wise” as hippies think it is. Until that time, yeah, let’s try not to do anything as drastic as hunting down every last one of those demon wolves.
Oh and lest you forget what about the resource costs of all that technology needed to control every single being on the planet. And the energy costs. And the problems we currently have with computer technology and bugs, hacks, etc. How much fun would it be to hack the reproductive control of every human on the planet and let them screw around in such a way that (unmodified) bunnies would be taking notes, which is incidentally why you need mind control as I wrote in #138. Or what about production of your nanos or what about distribution? Van Neumann machines are your best option? Oh great now you just got yourself another thing that can evolve, I don’t think that a change that would speed up the spread of the nano would be seen as desirable in this ‘perfect’ world.
Sorry you won’t be able to bullshit yourself out of this by citing science-fiction level technology since your technology won’t work (for long) as intended.
OK, in light of the Poe’s Law revelation, a not-snarky version of what I said @26: Many academic philosophers have a really bad habit of oversimplifying a situation in order to examine the logical consequences of an idea and then extrapolating without considering that the simplifications they made may have rendered the entire process absurd. When this is translated into popular media, even by the theorists themselves, the result can be an ridiculous fantasy that sometimes has an appeal to people who have not really thought about the issue. Of course, sometimes — and Peter Singer is a prominent example — these speculations can actually lead to interesting discussions. At others — and Peter Singer is a prominent example — they run to futility. I am also completely serious in suggesting that the Uehiro Center for Practical Ethics is a terrible influence on society, mostly for the semi-logical gloss people working there (notably Savulescu and Bostrom) give to transhumanism. Dawkins, I was kidding; he’s just trolling nowadays.
@Sean Goedecke, 115
Yes, it’s ridiculous. Any “solution” that involves killing (or letting them go extinct humanely) all the lions and dolphins and sharks and the rest is not a solution. Some possible objections:
1) Who said our goal should be to eliminate all suffering? We do the best we can with humans, who, by the way, still by far inflict the most suffering on others, with the most awareness. And that includes the suffering of all the animals we lead and are leading to extinction. But if we can somehow get a handle on all that (and who knows if we can), what exactly is then being suggested? First culling humanity into an anodyne race of always smiling people, and then going after the lions? There *should* be suffering, and pain, and grief in the world (how could there not be? The earth will be cooked to a cinder in a few billion years. Is the recommendation to give everyone happy drugs and have an entire civilization of billions not grieve for their inevitable demise?). We should be striving to stop the madness in Syria, the police brutality in the US, and to maintain the nearly eliminated amur leopard populations. Not to end all suffering.
That’s a partial rant-answer, anyway. I’m still not convinced that “killing all the predators” makes any sense whatsoever. But sure: there are lots of people who believe homeopathy isn’t a pseudoscience. And I’d be happy acknowledging that things aren’t so cut and dry, so long as an obviously bad solution is labeled as such. We can understand that 1 and 1 is 2 long before we actually *really* understand what such an equation entails.
Someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but as far as I know, all cephalopods are carnivores. I guess they’ll have to be wiped out too.
Emily @ 146:
Oh yes, they are indeed. This one should probably be wiped out first: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/03/30/friday-cephalopod-theyre-evolving-wings/
@Caine, 146: Well, seagulls are pretty aggressive predators themselves (I recently saw a photo of one swallowing an entire live starling) so maybe it’s only fair…
PS: I love your bird and other backyard-critter photos!
Another point: killing all lions by humanely letting them live out their lives in wild life preserves, is several orders of magnitude worse than doing what that dentist did. We can say we’re doing it to create a utopia that will last for billions of years, but we can’t change the terribleness of how we got there by eliminating pain from all participants involved.
Emily @ 148:
Jesus. That had to be a helluva a thing to see. And thank you so much!
Who Cares, you say, “And if you mean similar to a human kid, why should we care?” I assume that most readers of this blog take for granted that we should care about small human children. What’s in dispute is whether we should care about the subjective welfare of free-living beings of comparable sentience and sapience to human toddlers but of a different species or other taxonomic group. If your position is that human children don’t matter in themselves, but only in virtue of their potential to become sapient adults, then our background assumptions are radically different. However, I may have misunderstood your comment: if so, apologies.
Cost? Not merely is computer power increasing exponentially; price is collapsing in the opposite direction. If starvation, predation and disease still exist in tomorrow’s wildlife parks, their persistence won’t be because the cost of compassionate stewardship proves prohibitive, but because we choose to retain them.
Emily, yes, the old, the sick and the vulnerable deserve to be treated with care and respect. Extending the principle to members of other species – starting with long-lived vertebrates – is counterintuitive. But power brings complicity, whether we like it or not. How fast and how widely the “circle of compassion” can be spread across the phylogenetic tree depends on a host of factors. Yet religious and ethical-ideological opposition – and above all, status quo bias – are likely to prove a greater obstacles to compassionate stewardship of the rest of the living world than computational intractability. IMO.
I cannot believe that people really are arguing this seriously. This is just a bit shocking to me.
A world without predators isn’t some happy, hippy, heaven for all the prey animals. Along with the issues of overpopulation leading to mass starvation, are the issues of environmental degradation from overgrazing/overbrowsing (and this is even with human intervention) or simple overuse of the easiest to access areas.
Wolves are keystone species, kill them and we know full well what happens:
Sorry, I didn’t mean to embed the video!
@88 Emily said:
Good point. Come to think of it, if we were to truly design a world without suffering, rather than trying to deal with mating, behavioural,migration, etc. patterns of every form of life on the planet (and toddler-proofing their environments) it would be much more straightforward to hook up a sensation of pain to a biological kill switch. Instead of hurting, you fall unconscious and die.
These people don’t want Eden, they want enforced-happiness Hell. “Smile, or we’ll kill you!” Probably even have Bobby McFerrin on repeat as a reminder.
This reminds me of my favorite bit of food philosophy , Alan Watt’s Murder In the Kitchen . It really sums up how silly this sort of thinking is.
@110 David Pearce said:
Maybe this would clear some things up:
– Please define “suffering”, “sentient” and “sapient”.
Also, “complications aside” is a terrible dodge of reality. Rules are tested by boundary cases, not the easy stuff. Masochists enjoy suffering. What about them? Are we ethically required to hurt them to make them happy, or abstain from causing them pain?
Citation needed.
The ones shown to confer resistance to deadly bacterial infections.
No, you’re just proposing to design them.
But this implies that I must try to rescue anyone in any danger, no matter the danger to my own life. A building is on fire, about to collapse, and a person calls for help from the third floor. You are saying I must enter that building to try to rescue that person, regardless of the harm that may befall me; and that if I don’t, I bear some ethical responsibility for that person’s death. As a matter of fact, it would be more ethical under your system to NOT try to rescue the person in this scenario, given I conclude I have a good chance of dying in the attempt.
This contradiction is patently absurd.
Additionally, you are currently aware of suffering in the world that you will also admit to doing nothing about. What does your philosophical argument have to say about hypocricy?
Please tell me which species.
No, this is why we need data, modeling, experiments, evidence and analysis. Debates solve nothing.
@shikko, 154: …it would be much more straightforward to hook up a sensation of pain to a biological kill switch. Instead of hurting, you fall unconscious and die.
A bit off-topic, but have you read Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon? In one section a group of future (post-)humans, flying humanoids on Venus, give themselves a similar adaptation.
@David Pearce(#151):
So when are you going to address the problem that evolution presents for your flight of fancy
Or the fact that you need to mind control everything from the bacteria up. Or that what you are suggesting for humans is a variant of the Brave New World dystopia, that is if you don’t kill of all humans seeing that as hunter/gatherers we are predators as well.
Or the problem that we humans are damned bad at central planning. To put it succinctly the problem of the polit bureau dictating that this year only left boots will be produced.
Or anything else I wrote in #143 and forgot.
You forgot the relevant part. That came after the bit you quoted (btw I won 5 euros on the bet you’d only do a partial quote to ignore the context).
We don’t consider children competent and requiring constant care and looking after until well after the age that those other sapient species compare to in effective human age. And that is aside from the fact that they’ll gleefully starve, asphyxiate, disembowel or eat alive their own. Which is not something human children under normal circumstances do. Like I said in the part you ignored; We need to imprison those sapient species to be able to give them the same care as human children and in cases keep the members of said species separated from each other. Or again work on that magical mind control technology you keep trying to technobabble your way out of the tight spot you are in. Sorry this isn’t Star Trek where you can just realign the deflector dish to make stuff go away.
Life for animals and for many millions of humans is as Hobbes put it -” nasty, brutish and short.” That is nature’s way. Even those of us who avail of a more sophisticated lifestyle will one day succumb to the sudden but mercifully short pain of a fatal heart event or to the long, agonizing suffering brought about by cancer. Suffering and death is not pretty and when the crazies start posting celebratory announcements of the rescuing of one chicken or a sole calf then they are denying the inevitability of them suffering and dying. They also cannot seem to see the consequences of liberating not one but hundreds of thousands of chickens and cows. But then logical thinking is rarely an attribute of emotionally unbalanced anthromorphists.
Pauline let me give you a clue: the goal isn’t to liberate hundreds of thousands of chickens and cows so that they’re walking around on your street. It’s to shrink animal agriculture so future generations of “farmed animals” aren’t born simply to be tortured and murdered. Will this be a clean and tidy process–no, social justice never is.
BTW, pro-slavery forces during the Abolition struggles made similar arguments to yours “it’s natural,” “what will we do with all the slaves?” Probably not best to discuss a topic you’re so ill-informed on, and to slander people when you don’t have a clue.
btw, everyone’s life matters to them, and delaying the inevitability of suffering and dying for anyone is a noble goal, and perhaps the most noble goal. your lack of empathy, not so noble.
Giliell 119 –
>Because mass starvation of overpopulated grazers every once in a while is simply fun.
you can control grazer populations humanely via several methods.
Any evidence that it works outside of zoos, in the very large wild?
Nerd 162:
Thanks for asking
http://www.humanesociety.org/animals/deer/tips/deer-humane-control.html
lists a couple of studies
@163 hillaryrettig
Deer are one species on a planet that contains millions of them. In any case the object of ‘humane’ deer control isn’t to reduce animal suffering but to reduce human suffering because some people are squeamish at the thought of deer culls.
chris61 — your first point is of course valid. I like the idea of thinking about a world without predators, but recognize that tampering with ecological balance is complex and risky and usually a fail.
the object of humane deer control is absolutely to reduce deer suffering–why would you say it’s not? and it’s also to reduce human suffering. empathy is a wonderful thing.
If “predators” are bad, let’s eliminate them! Or at least confine them to situation where they can’t be “bad”…
Ok, start with birds. They eat earthworms. And raptors (e.g.) eat mice. Even worse! So, to be sure we stop all the non-vegan avian nasties, all birds to be shot or caged.
Mice eat insects. So all mice to be caged as well. And insects — some anyways — eat insects. (Not necessary other insects, e.g., the Praying Mantis.) So cage insects as well.
That — caging insects — isn’t a bad idea, as it removes one of the main crop-growing problems. Both the crop-eaters, and crop-eaters–eaters, are now in cages, eating, well, er, something. But not each other! That is the main point…
With no free mice, insects, birds, or other “predators”, clearly all will be, ah, better. Or at least imaginary-vegan. Some notable problems remain: Cats, Automobiles, and People. All three kill, two deliberately. One is controlled by another, so caging the other two (both living) will “solve” the problem caused by all three.
(We’ll ignore minor issues like growing all the necessary food for the caged nasties, since the important result is to lock up the long pigs. Who exactly grows the food is unclear. Extra-terrestrial aliens?)
Mad Hatter, lyrical mood music and the hushed reverential tones of a David Attenborough don’t evoke what it feels like to be eaten alive by wolves. Perhaps pause for a minute to consider what such a horrific experience entails.
Exactly the same arguments can (and have) been made against helping other members of other ethnic groups: the outcome of assistance would be inevitable Malthusian catastrophe. The solution: family planning.
Nonhuman animals can’t manage their own fertility. But cross-species immunocontraception in tomorrow’s wildlife parks can yield ecologically optimal population densities without the horrors of starvation, disease and predation.
In short, whether to re-enact the old Darwinian horror story will ultimate be an (un)ethical choice on the part of the planet’s cognitively dominant species
http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/genomics-is-about-to-transform-the-world/
@165 hillaryrettig
What is your evidence that enforced sterility reduces deer suffering more than bringing back predators or allowing hunters to kill them would? And why focus on deer? Why not those other 8 million plus species?
Actually, this bit of ‘philosophy’ is an example of the idiocy of utilitarianism. Suffering in itself has no moral significance at all. -Some- human suffering has moral significance under -some- circumstances, but not because it’s suffering; it’s because it’s human.
The only sensible argument for restricting human cruelty to animals is that it leads to cruelty to humans. As for animals they just do what they do.
Thinking of good and bad in terms of pleasure and pain is ignoble and profoundly dumb. Life is pain — the Buddhists are right about that — and it’s going to hurt you more and more until you die. Then you get to be dead for a very long time.
Historical note: in every age, cultural critics get accolades and strokes for telling people what they want, but do not need, to hear. And those who tell them what they need, but do not want, to hear get silenced or abused.
Eg., back in the 19th century Thomas Carlyle lashed the Victorians for what he considered their faults — being too frivolous, not working hard enough, not having enough moral earnestness, that sort of thing. For this he was considered a Deep Thinker, being of course precisely 180 degrees wrong.
Likewise, these days you get plenty of people telling us how terrible our cruelty and lack of empathy is. In point of fact, a warm shower of rancid ethical chicken soup — excessive and misdirected empathy — is precisely our problem; what we need is to be harder and tougher, not more sympathetic and caring.
Cue clucks of outrage and name-calling… 8-).
Incidentally, I’m a science fiction writer by trade, and a student of history (including the history of science fiction) as part of that, and one thing I can tell you with confidence is that absolutely nobody can predict the future.
Plenty of people try; professional futurists are even worse at it than science fiction writers.
There are a number of reasons for this, and stupidity and lack of information are only among the most obvious of them. Even more important are “identity-protective cognition” and “motivated reasoning”.
Essentially — and this has been proven experimentally — if your emotions are involved, increased intelligence and more information make you -worse- at understanding situations or predicting their outcomes, rather than better. You just become better at making up rationalizations for what you’re convinced -must- be so (or must be going to happen) anyway.
Really. You can look this up. Also, argument or debate are utterly futile (except when using rhetoric as an emotional bludgeon) when people are committed to a particular point of view.
Stephen, if we do eventually phase out the horrors of predation, the driving impetus will most likely come from “autistic” hyper-systematising rule-followers, not hyper-empathetic animal lovers – and for the same reason that vegetarians tend to be disproportionately female, whereas the ratio of male-to-female vegans is roughly even.
Pop-psychologising aside, intelligent moral agents will shortly be able to choose whether we want a biosphere where sentient beings hurt, harm and kill each other – or not. One needn’t be any kind of utilitarian to support phasing out the biology of involuntary suffering.
In my view, any defence of phasing out predation should stress non-violent options. The issue of (notional) reproductive rights for predators is controversial, but it’s not as inflammatory as a plea for mass genocide. Also, the feasibility of regulating population sizes via cross-species immunocontraception (etc) is worth stressing from the outset because most readers assume that philosophers are ecologically illiterate and don’t understand the thermodynamics of a food chain.
dude that “biology of involuntary suffering” as you put it is what made us and shaped us and every other living thing on the planet and in the process contributed to the shape of the very land we walk on.
What you are advocating is in essence sterile death.
The processes of the earth and by extension universe do not care about us nor can we bend them to our will except in small ways for a short time. We were not placed here to impose moral order on everything. It can not be done anyway.
death waits for all of us.
uncle frogy
Unclefrogy, should opponents of compassionate stewardship resist helping members of other ethnic groups – or merely members of other species? How exactly does a future where free-living sentient beings flourish without being physically molested amount to “sterile death” as you put it?
I worry that you run the risk of attacking a straw man.
@David Pearce: I don’t think you’re in a position to complain about unclefrogy attacking straw men when you yourself insinuate that he– and everyone else who criticizes your schemes– would be unwilling to help people of different ethnic groups.
And your stereotype of men as “systematizing” and women as “empathizing” is sexist pseudoscience, but there are others here that would be better able to debunk that. I don’t think actual autistic people would appreciate your assumption that they’d support your schemes, either.
Emily, forgive me, but I was assuming that unclefrogy and other critics would support compassionate interventions to help members of other ethnic groups. That was the point of the question: why support helping free-living sentients of other races and yet balk at helping free-living sentients of other species?
The point about “systematising” versus “mentalising” cognitive styles was that it’s not straightforwardly the case that vegans are more empathetic than vegetarians who are more empathetic than meat-eaters. Likewise with support versus opposition to systematic compassionate interventions in Nature.
worry all you want I am not proposing the suspension of the processes of biology by removing a major component of it , predation, because I find it distasteful. It is not possible to even do that without death being the result. Why do the deer or the horse or the impala find so much joy in running?
Their beauty of form that the pressures of selection gave them would remain for a time but they would fade to a mere shadow to become some version of a fat soft lapdog. turning the earth into a petting zoo
I do not think you have a very good understanding of biology certainly not evolution nor ecology to even contemplate altering it to such a profound degree.
I would like to know by what authority do we have the right and I take it from your statements the obligation to alter or interfere with the biological processes of the whole planet to such a degree.
pain is not suffering
all things even the earth itself will die
uncle frogy
Alas humans, who have so far failed to control their own population size and distribution, would declare that all animals would thus fall under their jurisdiction. Not because a nomad’s god declared that all living things should be subjugated to humankind, but no! For a far more humble & empathetic reason: that animal life, as it had existed on Earth for millions of years, was living wrongly. And so humans, who could not manage their own interpersonal grievances and massive suffering set forth to save every other animal from their own problems!
Uncle Frogy, the “joy” of the fleeing deer or impala is a state of abject terror.
To be suffocated is one of the most unpleasant experiences anyone can undergo – as victims of “waterboarding” will attest.
The same arguments critics make against compassionate interventions to help free-living nonhumans can (and have) been made by Social Darwinists against helping frail, weak and vulnerable humans – that “interference” will weaken the genetic stock of the race (etc). CRISPR and “gene drives” can potentially have the opposite effect – if used wisely.
“Pain is not suffering”?
To be asphyxiated, disembowelled or eaten alive involves immense suffering. A small but increasing number of bioethicists believe that the living world will be better off without them.
none of them seem to suffer while running and many have been seen to run with abandon with no predators in sight. especially the young. horses love running or would not be horse races. From the films I have seen wildebeests migration they seem to be doing that at a trot at least not much evidence of terror apparent.
I see that you have again failed to answer question by what authority do set in judgment and decide how the nature that gave rise to us is doing it in an immoral way and we should put a stop to it.
If we are the product of natural selection, which we are, in which predation is a significant part and which it is. Then if it is as you say basically an unethical and immoral state of things, than how is it the we who by your assertion are the supreme arbitrator of morality should come out of such a world?
If we end that system what would be the impetus for change be then? why would any surviving animal need to be the best of there kind in running or strength or cleverness?
uncle frogy
while you may be correct that a small number of bioethicists believe the predation is wrong and immoral and we should do away with predators, it is becoming more clear by those who have been in charge of monitoring and managing ecosystems in our national parks and forests both here and world wide that the ecosystems suffer degradation with out the predators presence in the prey animals and the the entire ecosystem as a whole. The biodiversity increases in both plants and animals.
the plan of eradicating predators has been done starting in the early 20th century and it has been found wanting.
uncle frogy
But unclefrogy, the problem is we should have learned to reason with our Brother Wolf rather than make war upon him. And now we must lock up Sister Deer for she hath eaten all the grass. And Nephew Grass never meant anyone any harm, he only meant to keep Grandniece Dandelion from ever seeing the sun again! Humans have so much work to do to put the natural world right.
I have two cats which are opportunist predators, given a chance. Seeing that they live indoors and that they (mostly) get along with each other, I’ve modified their behaviour to suit my human moral standards. It’s a lot of effort for two small animals though.
And yet, killing still happens in their name when the pet food companies collect meat and fish to fill their stomachs. Where do stop?
Unclefrogy, in the post-CRISPR era, selection pressure is likely to intensify, not diminish. Intelligent moral agents can engineer greater biodiversity and greater genetic variety than was ever possible under a regime of natural selection.
You ask what “authority” gives us the right to intervene. It’s the same “authority” that mandates helping members of other ethnic groups. Do you believe we were wrong to wipe out smallpox? Should eradicating malaria be reckoned immoral on the grounds we may upset ecological balance?
By all means highlight the pitfalls of compassionate stewardship. But a world where sentient beings don’t harm each other is more civilised than a world where we go around eating each other.
Well, why not simply breed the animal that wants to be eaten, like in the Hitchhiker’s Guide? That’s about as realistic and feasible as the Garden of Eden promised by the “no predator” crowd.
why not simply breed the animal that wants to be eaten
Because we’re not actually sure how to breed an animal (other than more humans) that is capable of wanting to be eaten and of expressing that desire? Plus then the ethical dilemma would be whether to fulfill its desire or get it some psychotherapy.
dianne
But that’s the point. Neither do we know how to create a world where predator species are extinct and the grazers suffer and ecology sufer no ill harm.
I agree, Giliell. Of the two, I think creating the willing dish of the day is probably the easier project.
David Pearce
Let us know when you find some.
Chigau, intelligent moral agents decided to wipe out smallpox. They succeeded. Phasing out the horrors of predation is an order of magnitude harder. But it’s still technically feasible. Ethically speaking, do we want a world where sentient beings hurt, harm and kill each other or not?
Pearce: yeah, animals eaten by lions suffer. So?
I just don’t -care-, and don’t consider this biological fact of any moral importance whatsoever. Suffering feels bad; that’s a reason to care about -my- suffering, not an impala’s. (Or yours, for that matter.) And I don’t care about -my- suffering all that much, nor do I consider it an ethical matter.
It’s an unpleasant neurological phenomenon; why should that have any -ethical- significance?
There is no link between “is” and “ought”.
You give me no reasons; you’re assuming the basis of your argument, which is based on utilitarianism, whether you realize that or not. To paraphrase Keynes, you’re the unconscious slave of a defunct philosopher. And you’re not impressing anyone by using subjective emoticons like “horrors”.
I wouldn’t cross the street to change the suffering of any number of impala, much less launch vast problematic interventions in the ecology of the planet, which we do not understand and probably never will, for the same reason that dogs will never understand algebra.
On the entirely different subject of whether it will ever be possible to do so, I don’t know… and you don’t either. I strongly suspect it won’t, and that arguments to the contrary are non-falsifiable singulatarian technobabble and ludicrous hubris. Like strong AI, it’s always there in the receding future.
This whole thing is nothing more than futile philosophical wanking. It is not possible and it never will be possible to know the world to such a detailed degree so we can eliminate predation without dire consequences.
Every variable involved we can know only within a certain margin of error. Even if our margins of error get smaller as our understanding/measurements improve, it can never be zero for any given variable. These variables influence the knowledge of the final outcome of any given system in different ways (see tolerance-stack-up) which can be extremely tricky for variables with non-Gaussian (Weibull, log-normal) distributions that do not ad but multiply (leading to snowball effects f.e.).
It is sobering how clueless can (not only) philosophers be of statistics and its implications.
This is one of the reasons why we also never can completely abandon in-vivo testing of medicaments, or mechanical testing of automotive components and why even NASA space missions have to allow for manual corrections/navigation etc. Even our best models for even the apparently simplest things (like flow of liquid in a system of pipes) cannot account for everything at all time and at some point you simply have to build your gear and test it.
And we do not have another planet to perfomr necessary tests on, not to mention that those tests would take millions of years at best, would actually increase suffering enormously for the duration of the tests and would lend results that could perhaps help predict the outcomes for a few milions of years – not into infinity (remember, the uncertainities stack up, the longer time interval you try to predict, the more uncertain you are about the outcome).
Thus the whole discussion makes about as much sense as discussions about if everyone could get a slice if the moon were made of cheese.
Stephen, you can argue that we ought not to intervene in the living world to prevent suffering. You can also argue that value judgements are neither true nor false. The problem comes when you try to argue both positions simultanaanously.
The is-ought problem? If my hand is in the fire, I don’t wait until I can construct a logically watertight chain of inference before withdrawing my hand from the flame. For reasons science simply doesn’t understand, a normative aspect is built into the nature of the experience of agony itself. Of course, I can’t directly experience the suffering of others. But why should this epistemological limitation on my part have deep metaphysical implications? Science give me no ground for supposing I’m ontologically special or privileged. Insofar as agony is bad for me, then it’s bad for anyone, anywhere. If you don’t care about your own suffering, then (thankfully!) your pain can’t be severe: some forms of suffering are so bad one would beting the world to an end to prevent it.
“Singularitarian technobabble”? I’m as sceptical of Singularitarianism as you are. But compassionate stewardship of the rest of the living world doesn’t entail invoking posthuman superintelligence, just recognisable extensions of existing technologies. Even sober-minded scientists describe the implications of CRISPR and genes drives technologies as jaw-dropping. However, to reiterate, advocates of compassionate biology don’t envisage a pan-species welfare state tomorrow. What’s at issue is the ethical principles that should govern the long-term management of the biosphere later this century and beyond.
Charly, do you think we were wrong to get rid of smallpox? What about malaria?
Yes, there are pitfalls. But ethical policy-making entails assessing risk-reward ratios – whether for sentient beings of other races or other species.
Smallpox in this context is red herring – it has no relevance to the issue at hand.
Predation – a world wide problem consisting of many variables influencing interactions between virtually all populations of all living creatures around the world and throughout the time.
Smallpox – one variable that influences only one species.
And if eradicating malaria should be achieved through eradication of its vectors (mosquitos) or their ecosystems (swamps) then yes, eradicating it would be wrong, exactly because the number of involved variables explodes very quickly so much, that far reaching consequences cannot be predicted at all.
Charly, that was the reason I asked; smallpox indeed infects only humans, whereas malaria infects e.g. lizards, birds, rodents and bats as well as primates. Were we were right to eradicate malaria in Europe? If so, why is it wrong to eradicate malaria infecting humans in sub-Saharan Africa? No, we can’t be certain of the consequences. But other things being equal, it’s better for sentient beings to be healthy rather than disease-ridden.
David Pearce, you are not adressing the points I made. Whether you miss them or evade them is of no interest to me, I am done wasting time.
Charly, if I’m to do justice to your position, I need to understand it. If it’s simply that phasing out predation is unwise because there are too many variables to take into account, then the same can be said of eradicating malaria. Yet (almost) everyone does grant we should aim to phase out Plasmodium-transmitting species of Anopheles mosquito in the wild. If ecological interventions to help sentient beings from other races are morally appropriate, why not other species? However, you take the unusual position that free-living Anopheles mosquitoes of the offending species should be conserved. This will result in immense suffering to human populations in sub-Saharan Africa.
David Pearce
huh
Chigau, indeed. If we have the chance to help a toddler in distress, the fact that the toddler may belong to a different ethnic group is not a morally relevant criterion. If we have the chance to help a being of comparable sentience and sapience to a human toddler, then should the fact (s)he belongs to a different species count as morally relevant? Maybe so – but this must be argued, not just assumed.